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new separate relkind for views (per some discussion back in September). I didn't force initdb, but rules regress test will show differences until you do one. |
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REGRESSION TESTS The regression tests are a comprehensive set of tests for the SQL implementation in PostgreSQL. They test standard SQL operations as well as the extended capabilities of PostgreSQL. The test suite was originally developed by Jolly Chen and Andrew Yu, and was extensively revised and repackaged by Marc Fournier and Thomas Lockhart. From PostgreSQL 6.1 onward the regression tests are current for every official release. The regression test can be run against an already installed and running server, or using a temporary installation within the build tree. Furthermore, there is a "parallel" and a "sequential" mode for running the tests. The sequential method runs each test script in turn, whereas the parallel method starts up multiple server processes to run groups of tests in parallel. Parallel testing gives confidence that interprocess communication and locking are working correctly. For historical reasons, the sequential test is usually run against an existing installation and the parallel method "stand-alone", but there are technical reasons for this. To run the regression tests after building but before installation, type $ gmake check in the top-level directory. (Or you can change to src/test/regress and run the command there.) This will first build several auxiliary files, such as platform-dependent "expected" files and some sample user-defined trigger functions, and then run the test driver script. At the end you should see something like ====================== All 75 tests passed. ====================== or otherwise a note about what tests failed. See the section called Test Evaluation below for more. Note: Because this test method runs a temporary server, it will not work when you are the root user (the server will not start as root). If you already did the build as root, you do not have to start all over. Instead, make the regression test directory writable by some other user, log in as that user, and restart the tests. root# chmod -R a+w src/test/regress root# su - joeuser joeuser$ gmake check (The only possible "security risk" here is that other users might be able to alter the regression test results behind your back. Use common sense when managing user permissions.) Alternatively, run the tests after installation. Tip: On some systems, the default Bourne-compatible shell (/bin/sh) gets confused when it has to manage too many child processes in parallel. This may cause the parallel test run to lock up or fail. In such cases, specify a different Bourne-compatible shell on the command line, for example: $ gmake SHELL=/bin/ksh check To run the tests after installation, initialize a data area and start the server, then type $ gmake installcheck The server is expected to be running on the local host with the default port number. Test Evaluation Some properly installed and fully functional PostgreSQL installations can "fail" some of these regression tests due to artifacts of floating point representation and time zone support. The tests are currently evaluated using a simple diff comparison against the outputs generated on a reference system, so the results are sensitive to small system differences. When a test is reported as "failed", always examine the differences between expected and actual results; you may well find that the differences are not significant. Nonetheless, we still strive to maintain accurate reference files across all supported platforms, so it can be expected that all tests pass. The actual outputs of the regression tests are in files in the src/test/regress/results directory. The test script uses diff to compare each output file against the reference outputs stored in the src/test/regress/expected directory. Any differences are saved for your inspection in src/test/regress/regression.diffs. (Or you can run diff yourself, if you prefer.) Error message differences Some of the regression tests involve intentional invalid input values. Error messages can come from either the PostgreSQL code or from the host platform system routines. In the latter case, the messages may vary between platforms, but should reflect similar information. These differences in messages will result in a "failed" regression test which can be validated by inspection. Date and time differences Most of the date and time results are dependent on the time zone environment. The reference files are generated for time zone PST8PDT (Berkeley, California) and there will be apparent failures if the tests are not run with that time zone setting. The regression test driver sets environment variable PGTZ to PST8PDT to ensure proper results. However, your system must provide library support for the PST8PDT time zone, or the time zone-dependent tests will fail. To verify that your machine does have this support, type the following: $ env TZ=PST8PDT date The command above should have returned the current system time in the PST8PDT time zone. If the PST8PDT database is not available, then your system may have returned the time in GMT. If the PST8PDT time zone is not available, you can set the time zone rules explicitly: PGTZ='PST8PDT7,M04.01.0,M10.05.03'; export PGTZ There appear to be some systems which do not accept the recommended syntax for explicitly setting the local time zone rules; you may need to use a different PGTZ setting on such machines. Some systems using older time zone libraries fail to apply daylight-savings corrections to dates before 1970, causing pre-1970 PDT times to be displayed in PST instead. This will result in localized differences in the test results. Some of the queries in the "timestamp" test will fail if you run the test on the day of a daylight-savings time changeover, or the day before or after one. These queries assume that the intervals between midnight yesterday, midnight today and midnight tomorrow are exactly twenty-four hours -- which is wrong if daylight-savings time went into or out of effect meanwhile. Floating point differences Some of the tests involve computing 64-bit (double precision) numbers from table columns. Differences in results involving mathematical functions of double precision columns have been observed. The float8 and geometry tests are particularly prone to small differences across platforms, or even with different compiler optimization options. Human eyeball comparison is needed to determine the real significance of these differences which are usually 10 places to the right of the decimal point. Some systems signal errors from pow() and exp() differently from the mechanism expected by the current PostgreSQL code. Polygon differences Several of the tests involve operations on geographic data about the Oakland/Berkeley, CA street map. The map data is expressed as polygons whose vertices are represented as pairs of double precision numbers (decimal latitude and longitude). Initially, some tables are created and loaded with geographic data, then some views are created which join two tables using the polygon intersection operator (##), then a select is done on the view. When comparing the results from different platforms, differences occur in the 2nd or 3rd place to the right of the decimal point. The SQL statements where these problems occur are the following: SELECT * from street; SELECT * from iexit; The "random" test There is at least one case in the "random" test script that is intended to produce random results. This causes random to fail the regression test once in a while (perhaps once in every five to ten trials). Typing diff results/random.out expected/random.out should produce only one or a few lines of differences. You need not worry unless the random test always fails in repeated attempts. (On the other hand, if the random test is never reported to fail even in many trials of the regress tests, you probably should worry.) Platform-specific comparison files Since some of the tests inherently produce platform-specific results, we have provided a way to supply platform-specific result comparison files. Frequently, the same variation applies to multiple platforms; rather than supplying a separate comparison file for every platform, there is a mapping file that defines which comparison file to use. So, to eliminate bogus test "failures" for a particular platform, you must choose or make a variant result file, and then add a line to the mapping file, which is "resultmap". Each line in the mapping file is of the form testname/platformnamepattern=comparisonfilename The test name is just the name of the particular regression test module. The platform name pattern is a pattern in the style of expr(1) (that is, a regular expression with an implicit ^ anchor at the start). It is matched against the platform name as printed by config.guess. The comparison file name is the name of the substitute result comparison file. For example: the int2 regress test includes a deliberate entry of a value that is too large to fit in int2. The specific error message that is produced is platform-dependent; our reference platform emits ERROR: pg_atoi: error reading "100000": Numerical result out of range but a fair number of other Unix platforms emit ERROR: pg_atoi: error reading "100000": Result too large Therefore, we provide a variant comparison file, int2-too-large.out, that includes this spelling of the error message. To silence the bogus "failure" message on HPPA platforms, resultmap includes int2/hppa=int2-too-large which will trigger on any machine for which config.guess's output begins with 'hppa'. Other lines in resultmap select the variant comparison file for other platforms where it's appropriate.